Museums & Galleries NSW

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

We're building a website: We want you now

The Museums & Galleries of NSW website will highlight your museums, galleries and Aboriginal cultural centres to the public.

We want you now!

Our website will be nothing without your participation. The whole public facing side will be profiling your exciting places, exhibitions and events.

Right now M&G NSW staff are putting basic information about every one of you into our website but we need you to add the colour. Contact us if you would like to be one of the first to get started!

Add content to your profile page

So let's take a look at the profile page. In this case we've built a profile page for the Lady Denman Maritime Museum in Jervis Bay:

Add pictures

Upload images onto your page and create a slideshow. You have amazing collections, objects, works of art, exhibitions and events. We want to see them.

What makes you special?

Write a description that tells visitors what they'll see and hear and why you stand out from the crowd. How do you reflect your region and your town?

Connect to your social media

Simply add your Twitter, Facebook or Youtube account and they will feed into these custom built modules.

If you don't belong to social media, no biggie because . . .

Later on: News, Events and Exhibitions

From early September we will want to know everything that's going on at your museum, gallery or Aboriginal cultural centre and how you're connecting with your region. You'll be able to easily send us information with an online form and it will become part of the state-wide Events and Exhibitions database.

We want to hear from:

Aboriginal cultural centres
Community and volunteer-run museums
Regional public galleries
Regional museums

Artist-run initiatives

2013 Artist In-Residence Grant recipient Vic McEwan at Griffith Regional Art Gallery

Vic McEwan is a composer, sound and installation artist, producer and director who is interested in landscape, communities, remote spaces and cross art form collaboration.

As a recipient of a 2013 Artist In-Residence grant (ACR), funded by the Copyright Agency Limited Cultural Fund (CAL) and managed by Museums & Galleries NSW, McEwan has embarked on a year-long exploration of a community in recovery, actively seeking the stories from the town of Yenda in the wake of the 2012 floods.

The floods

“In 2012 many parts of Australia experienced heavy flooding and storm related damage. Yenda, a small town in the Riverina near Griffith with a population of under 1500 people, was given an immediate evacuation order… the consequences being that no time was allowed for collection of precious items or preparation of households and contents… Approximately 230 families, nearly half of the population, have been unable to return due to the severity of damage.” describes McEwan.

Recording the stories

Image still from Vic McEwan’s Yenda Flood Recovery Arts Project, youtube courtesy the artist and ABC.

Hosted by Griffith Regional Art Gallery and based in Yenda for his residency, McEwan began the project by inviting members of the community to share their stories in the first of many meetings and ongoing public consultations.

Using the residency as a large scale research, documentation and development project, McEwan began by recording the stories of Yenda to develop a communal framework for how the arts can be used by communities recovering from trauma.

Image: Invitation for community meetings in Yenda

by Vic McEwan held earlier this year.

The resulting video projections, video mapping and installations, expressing the community experience, will be shown at a final public event as a celebration of Yenda’s resilience, their rebuilding efforts and the difficulties and successes the community has faced during their ongoing path to repair.

Learn more

http://www.vicmcewan.com/#!yenda/cmm

For more information on the Artist or Curator in Residence program see the Museums & Galleries NSW website: http://mgnsw.org.au/grants/gallery_grants/

The Artist or Curator in Residence Grant Program is supported by the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund, and is managed by Museums and Galleries NSW.

Video Encounters: The Museum Robot Project

At Museum of Sydney on Friday 10 May, delegates converged both physically and virtually for Video Encounters to witness some of the best videoconferencing experiences Australia has to offer in the one half day seminar.

Museum Robot Project National Museum Australia

Robert Bunzli

Robert is the Project Manager for the Museum Robot Project, a collaboration between the National Museum Australia, CSIRO and the Commonwealth Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. He has a background in digital delivery of interactive education, through multipoint video conferences, and digital distribution of live events through web streaming. His interest developed through his previous role as Production Manager for Digital Outreach at Questacon. Robert is passionate about public institutions rethinking ways of engaging audiences with the help of the NBN.

To see more information about the Museum Robot visit the National Museum of Australia website.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Access to Funding: Arts NSW

On March 21 M&G NSW, in partnership with the Museum of the Riverina, presented Access to Funding, a workshop delivering skills to make accessing funds a reality. Below are the presentations from the federal organisations.

Gabrielle Eade Acting Manager, Funding Programs Visual Arts, Museums, Major Festivals, Literature and New MediaArts NSW

Gabrielle is currently A/Manager, Funding Programs, at Arts NSW, working across a range of areas including Visual Arts, Museums, Major Festivals, Literature, History and New Media.

Arts NSW is the NSW Government’s arts funding and policy body. Through the Arts Funding Program the NSW Government offers a range of opportunities that support artists and arts and cultural organisations in NSW.

This presentation will introduce the Arts NSW Arts Funding Program, including a range of devolved funding programs which offer alternative opportunities for volunteer run organisations, galleries and museums, and offer tips and advice on how to apply for funding.

Museums Australia National Conference 2013

Museums Work: people, industry and nation at the

National Convention Centre, Canberra

Sculptor Patricia Piccinini takes her art to the skies, constructing a hot air
balloon in the shape of a whale, in honour of Canberra's centenary.

The impact of ‘megatrends’, international careers forged by Australian museum professionals, the amazing West Kowloon development in Hong Kong and Patricia Piccinini’s huge ‘Skywhale’ hot air balloon, were among the highlights of Museums Australia’s recent 2013 national conference held in Canberra on the weekend of May 17-20.

Regional Remote and Community Day

400 eager delegates representing all states and territories were registered across the 4 day conference. It commenced with the dedicated Regional Remote and Community Day (Friday 17), which included plenary presentations about the Buriganyja Wanggaya, Old People Talking Project from the Gascoyne Region of WA and an outline of record breaking programs run by the Bendigo Art Gallery.

To mark international museums day, the conference remained in plenary format throughout Saturday. Robyn Archer gave the first keynote reminding all that in celebrating ‘the past’ we should always connect to the present and future. All agreed that Robyn’s ‘SkyWhale’ commission for the Centenary of Canberra admirably illustrated her point.

Indigenous voices

Social Justice Campaigner and an elder from the Iwaidja tribal group (south-west Darwin/ Coburg Peninsula), Dr Tom Calma, connected all present with his call to create opportunities for Indigenous voices and stories to be heard. As Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Calma worked to advance Australia as an inclusive society. His keynote sought to highlight many successes and some key challenges for museums to continue their partnerships with indigenous Australians towards achieving reconciliation and respect.

Michael Brand

Michael Brand followed with a personal account of his career to date. In reflecting on his professional journey, Michael discussed his time as Director of the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and referred briefly to the spark provided by his visit to Fatehpur Sikri, a city built just west of Agra in India, during the second half of the 16th century, by Emperor Akbar. It was abandoned some 15 years later due to a poor water supply and remains one of India’s most extraordinary examples of Mughal architecture.

Michael Lynch

There is no doubt that Michael Lynch has had a remarkable career. Having held leadership roles with the Sydney Opera House, the Australia Council & London’s Southbank Centre, he enthralled all with an outline of his current preoccupation, development of the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong. His presentation focussed on the ambitious M + component of the project – as a game changer for museums in the 21st century.

Megatrends

Megatrends got their airing in a fascinating keynote given by Dr Stephan Hajkowicz, a principal scientist with the CSIRO. Drawing on their ‘Our Future World’ report, Hajkowicz outlined key social, economic and environmental changes to be faced over the next decade under the following six identified megatrends – More From Less, Great Expectations, Going, Going, Gone, Virtually Here, Forever Young & The Silk Highway.

Dr Brendan Nelson

The final Keynote provided delegates with an ‘outsiders’ view from a newcomer to the museum industry. Dr Brendan Nelson has had a distinguished career in public service, serving as a minister in two terms of the Howard Government. He passionately spoke about his new role as Director of the Australian War Memorial and of his deep conviction that Australia’s history is everything to do with its future.

As a networking opportunity and as a chance to re-charge professional batteries, How Museums Work: people, industry and nation was a great success and testament to outgoing MA President, Andrew Sayer’s vision for and contribution to, museums and galleries, large and small.

This post has no title. Purposely.

Image courtesy of Capture Queen via FlickaCC

And the reason why this post has no title is so that you don’t click on something else when you know what it’s about. So I’ll say it really quickly: DigitalOnlineTools. There! Relatively painless— even though I know your finger is, at this moment poised, ready to make the exit click―so wait! Before you leave, consider these few questions.

Have you ever needed to create a pic for your newsletter? Want to crop, rotate, add a speech bubble easily and quickly and you don’t own Adobe Creative Suite? Or perhaps you need an editor for the new catalogue or a designer for the annual report? … If we've got your attention now, then keep on reading.

Here at M&GNSW, we've been at the Navigating Not-for-Profits in the new world conference. Hosted by Connecting Up, an organisation who specialise in supporting the not-for-profit sector, this year’s conference was about learning to thrive in a digital world.

There were lots of great sessions but one of the main discussion streams was about the abundance of free digital tools. A digital tool is simply one that relies on the internet to exist. The term itself is kind of meaningless (with added ‘yawn’ factor) and so is often broken down into things like online marketing tools, online accounting tools and so on.

Nevertheless, this digital online world of ours is producing some really fun and useful things— the market is a fast growing and highly competitive one and we, the consumers are spoilt for choice as pimply geek coders and software engineers jostle for our customer loyalty. There’s almost nothing that you can’t find online and much of it is open-source and some of it free.

So don’t be daunted— all it takes is a couple of hours to explore and experiment. Have a look at these, they’re some our favourites.

Doodle is a scheduling tool which does what Outlook doesn't do well.

easel.ly lets you create very cool info-graphics.

Freelancer is an online editing and transcription service which works where editors bid on your proposed job.

Pixilr provides creative online photo editing without the need for Photoshop.

Vine is a mobile app that enables it’s users to create and post video clips. Video clips created with Vine have a maximum length of 6 seconds and can be shared or embedded on social networking services such as Twitter.

Join me is an online meeting tool which combines instant screen sharing and powerful meeting tools in an app that anyone can use.

Wrike is an online project management platform similar to Basecamp and Redmine.

Wordle If you are like tag clouds for your website, this is for you.

Camtasia helps you create professional videos – use it to record on-screen activity, customise and edit content and then share your videos with anyone across most devices and platforms.

Slideshare provides links to lots of other sites which specialise in helping you tell your stories.

We’ve also got a long list of the online analytic tools as well, but at risk of exhausting you, we’ll save the next bunch for another day.

Carole

Museum of Sydney: Video Encounters

At Museum of Sydney on Friday 10 May delegates converged both physically and virtually for Video Encounters to witness some of the best videoconferencing experiences Australia has to offer in the one half day seminar.

Below, Karen Player and Ben Newsome introduce how video conferencing technology can be used.

Karen Player - Museum Outreach Coordinator - Australian Museum

Karen has a background in environmental science and education. She is committed to outreach programs throughout NSW and beyond. Karen has worked at the Australian Museum for the last 14 years in education and interpretive roles. Karen has been coordinating video conferencing programs for the last three years. Last year the Museum presented video conferencing events to 7,500 students from 200 schools across the state. Karen is the chair of Virtual Excursions Australia, a professional video conferencing network of over 30 educational content providers.

Ben Newsome - Director - Fizzics Education

Ben has run hundreds of video conferences for schools across Australia and around the world since 2010. He will discuss how free apps can link iPads, smart phones and desktop computers to traditional video conferencing equipment so you can video conference without the equipment. Additionally this session covers how Fizzics Education is using these apps to support science clubs in schools and libraries.

Note: this presentation is made up of the video grid below. In the left hand top corner is Ben presenting to the audience, while around him are various staff using traditional video conferencing technology (top right) and mobile technology in the videos below.